


What the Hell is Love, or, did you ever see a dream walking

by Eleanor_Guenevere



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Beren is actually feral, Beren talks to animals, Birds are gossips, Birds call Beren a shrike, Colors, F/M, Feel free to deck me with facts, Flintknapping, Hair Brushing, Headcanon, I do not have a copy of the Silm on hand, Lúthien has a habit of bringing unsuitable things home, Lúthien was denied agency, Watership Down references, his not hers sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:41:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26804536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eleanor_Guenevere/pseuds/Eleanor_Guenevere
Summary: ... chase it before it goes. In which Lúthien is sick of being treated like a child when she’s at least as old or older than Maedhros, and Beren is low-key a feral disaster.
Relationships: Beren Erchamion/Lúthien Tinúviel
Comments: 4
Kudos: 16





	What the Hell is Love, or, did you ever see a dream walking

**Author's Note:**

> Headcanons at the bottom, by all means fact-check me. I like interpreting Lúthien as being genuinely weird and occasionally straight-up eldritch. I like interpreting Beren as being also really fucking weird, and also very human. I also think the idea of Men not having history before the Elves is absolute bullshit, but that doesn’t come into play here, but it almost did.

Lúthien is pretty and powerful and trapped by the ones she loves. Every damn day she wakes up before dawn, aching for a life she cannot claim. She wanders from the caverns of Menegroth to the forest, halted by the distant silence that is the Girdle, and tries to breathe, dances and sings like she's about to die because she has never lived as her own woman, and it seems she never will.

She is impossible, a lovely woman wrapped in the glory of a primordial melody, burning like the stars above never knew how to emulate, a living fire. When she speaks, her words resound with mountainous tread and when she sings, the air falls still as though even Manwë holds his breath to hear her better. In her eyes is all the seas, dark and grey, endless tidal waves held at bay by the bulwark of her parents' love.

Blue and white are children's colors in Doriath.

Lúthien is fucking old, okay? She's so old, she's older than fucking Maedhros, (maybe, she'd have to meet him to ask: but he can't enter and she can't leave). She knows damn well she's fully grown, and the full range and scope of her abilities, but her father? he won't accept it. "You'll always be my little girl, my flower-child, little petal." Her mother? To her mother, all the Elves seem too young, and Lúthien, precious Lúthien, a treasure to be protected for all time.

and if she goes she breaks their hearts and she loves her parents more than anything, anything...

It's like being sucker-punched when she lays eyes on Beren. No, not the first time, the first time he looks like a bear with mange and smells like rotting orc. It's when she comes again, to investigate this strange ephemeral being that now dwells in her clearing, that she looks and sees him, scruffy, sweet, starved. She wants to claim him for her own special thing, take him home and feed him, bathe him, wrap power around him so that everyone else knows he belongs to her. It wouldn't be the first time she's wanted to keep something wild, bind it until it's tame enough to nibble dainties from her hand. The first time, it was a wolf, and her father led it away, and her mother held her back, shielding her from the sight but not the sound of the guard's blade hewing through the cervical vertebrae.

Instead, she takes a comb and runs it through his hair, completing the job his fingers began, pulling tangles loose, pulling soft noises from his throat. For a second she pauses, and rubs under his chin as though he were a cat, feeling the uneven cut. She asks where he got a blade to shave with, and he points at a small pile of broken rock. "I was making arrowheads anyway," he said, and smiled up at her. "You're a treat from any angle, aren't you?"

Beautiful, lovely, graceful, perfect, part-divine, dreamlike, sublime, but she's never been called desirable before, not to her face, not where the Queen might hear. And he knows she's all that, he's called out for it all his life, but the red that spreads across her cheekbones and runs down her throat calls back to him. Her skin tastes as sweet as clear water,

but as soon as he had started whatever little miracle that was (and her neck still burns with the feel of his mouth, open and frighteningly warm) he retreats, and looks at her as though he had been caught trespassing by Melian herself.

It's too fast. He knows it; she feels it. It's too fast but they've already collided and they're spinning under the pressure of everything they have not had yet. His voice is hoarse from his years of speaking to naught but the birds and beasts, accented strongly with his native tongue, and he is so glad to speak and be understood. She has been a princess and a daughter so long, that it is joy to be seen as a woman, reliable and not reliant. Nightingale, he calls her, and she traces the shadow of his beard, and calls him bear, wolf, cat, stag. Bird for beast.

Beren is thirty-two, okay? He's thirty-two, so he's old enough to know better, right? He's been a man full-grown for fourteen years, and for four of those, he's been fighting on his own. Every damn day he wakes up before dawn, stretches his right hand from where he'd been gripping his sword in his sleep (it's an ache that never goes away, even when the hand itself does). He wanders from one part of fearsome countryside to another, chattering in the tongue of the birds, exchanging idle gossip (apparently, the white-crested raptor and its flock had nested in a hollow by water with another flock, which is really no good. Also, the white-crested raptor said that there was good hunting in spiders for the shrike, yes, over here, how many spiders, many-many).

He is impossible. His mother said it when he'd sprint naked through the village as a child, his father said it when Beren decided to try wielding two spears at a time and knocked himself up the head, his uncle said it when he decided to lick the elf-guest in the mead-hall on the ear (he was fourteen and drunk, thank you, and the elf was drunk too, and didn't really mind). They're Men, and the House of Bëor (as the Elves call it). They're impossible twice over already. Thrice, as the Outlaws of Dorthonion.

Isolated, beset, he is impossible four times. Some say five, when he crossed Ered Gorgoroth.

The first time he sees a flower, he eats it. He wonders where the hell he is that flowers are growing, and even tries to ask the rabbit he locks eyes with, but the rabbit can't make out Beren's Lapine, and leaves before he swallows the second mouthful of flowers and can try Hedgerow instead. (Lapine isn't the easiest of animal tongues, especially not when he's stuffing his face with the first truly edible shit he's seen in months). When he hears singing, and melodious singing as well? he thinks he's fucking lost it.

he creeps in that direction and the forest itself muffles his presence until he might as well be one of its own beasts

There's a painful gladness in his heart as he beholds a face without muzzle or whiskers, a body garbed in cloth and not fur or feathers, and he leaps into the clearing, wanting to be seen, to be acknowledged, wanting to speak in a tongue of Elves or Men and not getting scolded by some picky deer about his grammar (as though deer have anything to say on the matter of intelligence). When she runs away, he's genuinely hurt, staring at the tree line where she vanished. Then, in the manner of Mannish men, he lifts his arm and scent-checks himself. Meditates for a second on what combination entered his nose. Realizes he hasn't really bathed thoroughly since... yeah, even his mother would depart in haste from that.

He figures that the local waters must be safe for bathing in, that he can risk being naked and away from his sword, since there was a woman singing and dancing barefoot in a glen. He uses the silt at the bottom of the pool to scrub the blood and offal out of his skin, and seeing a likely looking piece of chert, climbs out of the water and knocks a flake off to shave with. It's ugly. He ends up washing more blood off, and there are bits of hair that won't come off damn it

He settles to making arrowheads while his clothes or what's left of them dries, when there's a noise behind him, and something in him melts as he looks at her, and before he knows it, his head is in her soft lap and she's humming while her hands are in his hair, and he'd lost a piece of his heart when he first saw her, but now she's staking a claim on the rest of it. His mouth is open as he starts talking, he's been so silent for so long, and he'd been the village chatterbox as a child,

a feast to a starving man (and he's still naked, how is he only cognizant of that now, what was he thinking), and he would prostrate himself at her feet forever.

It's too fast.

For the first time, he can speak, weep, rejoice, feel; he can depend on her

For the first time, she can break her parents' hearts; she is independent

**Author's Note:**

> Blue and white are not exclusively children’s colors in Doriath, but they are more frequently worn by children, so basically the equivalent of pastels.
> 
> Thingol and Melian basically didn’t give their precious baby girl much agency, even if she is about Maedhros’s age.
> 
> Beren looked and smelled roughly like he crawled out of a dumpster. Four years with nobody to complain about the stench of B.O. is hell on a man’s sense of hygeine. It’s a minor miracle he didn’t die of sepsis.
> 
> Let the House of Bëor flintknap and pass down oral histories in their own tongue. Taliska is still the language they use when the Elves aren’t looking, and they don’t tell the Elves everything. Let Men keep secrets from the Elves.
> 
> Both Beren and Celegorm speak to animals (canon). The animals totally know, “Hey, these two speak our tongues.” What I’m saying is that Beren and Celegorm sorta knew each other by the animal’s gossip, but when they meet face to face, they don’t recognize it because it gets lost in translation, and they didn’t exactly chit-chat in person.
> 
> Beren was a wild child.


End file.
